Growing a Business

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season where we're going through a series of interviews. This is going to be part two of an interview with Krishnamohan. We're going to get into a little bit of the secret of how do you grow your business? How do you go from maybe a little solopreneur thing to a smaller medium-sized business? How do you go from a medium-sized business to the famous things like double your income or add $10 million a year to your income? There's things like that. They may seem gimmicky, and sometimes those things are, or at least the advertisement of them, but not completely. There is a reality behind these things. There are ways to grow. It's just, are you ready? That's a lot of what we're going to talk about in this episode. This maybe will be a good soul-searching kind of episode for you to listen to as you ask yourself, are you ready? Are you willing to essentially pay the price to take those next steps? We're going to talk about two ways that you can do so. Without any further ado, let's get back to Krishna. Based on that and knowing how much that impacted you, is that something that particularly when you're looking at either the businesses that you're coaching or especially going through maybe some of those small companies that you were working with, did that impact how you tried to create essentially a culture or direct some of the leaders or maybe help them to be better leaders? Absolutely. Again, I see that readiness is a challenge in the market. You can aspire for anything in this world, but the basic question is, are you ready? I want to win Olympic gold medal. It's fine. It's a good dream, but are you ready? Are you willing to commit to do whatever it takes to get that medal? Most of the cases, the answer is not yes. If the answer is yes, then I have all the steps necessary to take you to the finish line. If the answer is no, what are you willing to commit? How much are you willing to pay the price? Pay the price is not money. Whatever it needs to be done. Based on that, then I can guide them. Not everybody is aspiring for big things. Not every startup people start companies, but they really don't know what to do with that. They really don't know. I have this brilliant idea. It doesn't mean anything. What do you want to do with that? Do you want to build a business to 20 million dollars and sell it to a private equity? Or do you want to build a business just because you hate your job and just retire making half a million dollars? Or are you building this just because you have some relationship through your work? That depends. If I'm building this company where I will have 10,000 employees or 1,000 employees, then I better develop my leadership skills. I better develop hiring skills, operations, all kinds of things. Hiring, training, mentoring, coaching, those are important. Some of these small mom and shop businesses, I want to make money. That doesn't solve the problem. That doesn't fix anything. Yes, you will make some money here and there, but that doesn't mean that you're building a company. Small business owners, they don't build companies. They just start a business to make money. That doesn't make sense. Very few people have the intention to build companies and only tend to have an exit plan or some plan. That actually brings up a good question because you've seen now, I'm sure you've been exposed to numerous companies, some that have probably been fairly successful, some that have not been or have even had to shutter their doors. Is there among those, either the successful ones or the less successful ones, are there some certain traits or attitudes that the founders or the driving people that start the company have that is something where you can sort of say, hey, if this is your approach, you're more likely to be successful. If this is your approach, you're more likely to fail. I think to broadly generalize, like for any startup, I think most of them are generally stuck with their product or service. That's pretty typical. I'm a specialist in this, so naturally I'll start something in this area because I'm good at it, which makes sense. And then I'm so much attached to it. Through that process, what happens is I'm not focusing on the marketing side, branding side, sales, building teams, again, hiring, mentoring, coaching. You have to learn these skills as a founder. If you don't have those skills, I'm not saying that you have to be an expert. At least you should have some basic skills to actually hire the right people and manage those people. So you have to be aware of all the aspects of the business while you are doing your thing, which is developing your product or whatever, your patent or service. And many of the things that I'm talking about are blind spots. It's just not even in their awareness. So because of that, they're busy. They don't have time. They're so busy in building the business, in the business. And then they start developing these weaknesses. The weakness could be not having strong financial foundation. Financial foundation is not bringing money from your pocket. Financial foundation is building business credit for your business so you can raise capital based on your business. It needs a focused effort. Somebody needs to put effort. And the second thing is sales. As a founder, I need to understand what it takes to get my product to my customer. I need to understand the process. You may not come from sales, but you need to learn what it takes to get there. If you don't know that, you may be hiring the best sales guy, but you mismanage him. And you blame the sales guy. Of course. It happens every day, all day long. And then tell me how many founders have burned a lot of money with salespeople not reaching anywhere. You will have example after example. I'm not blaming both the parties. All I'm trying to say is both of them need to come onto the same page to achieve the goal. It's important that as a founder, you should be able to identify the talent, the closers, the guys who can really close business. And then also develop the ability to manage the guy. Then things happen. And I think it's the same thing with the marketing. If you don't have understanding of the marketing, then you may be struggling with some basic stuff. And then the guys who really understand marketing, they crush at the same time. Your ability to reach a larger audience, your ability to make an impact, your ability to communicate the value proposition, your ability to reach millions of prospects is directly proportional to your revenues. And if you don't have that ability and expect some miracles to happen, it's not going to happen. Look at the failure rate in businesses. It's phenomenal. If you are aware of all these things, you mitigate your failure rate and you increase your success rate. Otherwise, most successful guys, they learn by failing. They have already failed one or two businesses. That's why the third business was successful, but they learned the lessons. But if we know those lessons ahead of the time, maybe we don't need to fail one more company. Maybe we don't need to fail one more product. Make sense? Yes. That's it. Makes a great sense. I mean, let me go right on, follow right up on that. So say somebody comes to you and they're starting a new business and they just basically they just finished a business that failed. What would be maybe your thoughts or your recommendations for them to find a way or maybe something that you do to ensure that you do learn from that mistake? Yeah. I think the first thing is to take notes of all the things that you did not do right and did not go well in that business and then let him make him to do the SWOT analysis on that particular business. But the main thing for anybody who is starting off is being very clear about his objectives. What is it that you're trying to do in this market? What problem are you solving? Oh, I have this technology. All those things are secondary. What is it that you're trying to solve in this market? What is the size of that market? Are there any players in this market? What is your space in this market? How much of that space do you want? How do you get to that space? What is your game plan? What is the money that you have access to right now? What are the things that you don't have right now to get to that place? How do you get them? Who are the people that needs to be on this team for you to get there? And how much time frame that you can give for your own survival? What is your plan B option if that doesn't happen by that end date? How do you get access to the funding to run this company at these stages? If you have that kind of a detailed analysis, not the traditional business plan, you'll be fine. You will get to answer. You may not have answers right away, but you will get answers. So sort of a follow up to that. You mentioned earlier blind spots. That's always something I've been fascinated with for many years, blind spots in many areas of our lives that we all have. So how do you, and this maybe go even to you personally, how does one find those blind spots or find ways to keep them from getting them in trouble? First and foremost thing is being aware that we have blind spots. When you're driving a car, you need to be aware that there is a blind spot. That's the step number one. Once you know that there are blind spots, then you start looking for those blind spots. It's the same thing in the business. What are the things that I don't know? How many people ask this question on a daily basis? What are the things that I don't know about my business? What are the things that I'm not doing that I'm supposed to do? What is it that I'm missing on a daily basis? Right? What what are the things I do for my product? What are the things that I'm not doing for my service? What are the things that I'm not doing for my customers? What else is possible with my customers that I don't know? So that with the combined with the finance sort of point of view that you have, because I've definitely seen stories of various things from revenues and sales and marketing and financial related issues that have sunk many a company. What are maybe some common blind spots you've seen in that area? Because those are those are the lifeblood. Yeah, so it's simple, right? We're always chasing revenues with the hope that you have a better net income or EBITDA and that free clash flow can help you to survive for the next many years and potentially make you rich and do all the cool stuff expansion growth and acquisitions are a lot of cool stuff. What happens is that the larger companies, the most successful companies are also having corporate credit, business credit. That means that they have access to these credit options from the market while they build their companies, while they focus on revenues. The smaller companies, they don't have all these things, you know, but if there is a way for them to do it, they can build business credit while they build the company. So building a business credit is a conscious effort. You need to have something called paydex score, you know, that's parted with the DNB like your FICO scores. So most small business owners are not aware of that. They're looking at their own credit. They are the collateral for anything that they're doing for their business. And there's only so much that can happen. There's so much limitation to it. And then if something happens to their business, something doesn't go well, then they go after him and they lose their house, car and all that stuff. And then they damage their personal credit because of their business mistakes, which happens every day. But if they build business credit simultaneously while they build the company, it will take about six to nine months to build business credit. It's not going to happen overnight. Whether you are a startup company, you have zero revenues, you have $10 million revenue, it's all the same thing. You have to build it like step by step. And once you have it, then goal for you is to separate yourself using your personal credit and collateral to raise capital for your business. If you do that, you did a good job because you separated yourself with your entity. It's possible. Once you do that, then you have access to vendor credit, trade credit, unsecured lines, unlimited financing. In fact, the eligibility would be 10 to 100 times than your personal eligibility if you are able to build the business credit. So then you are addressing the money problem. If you have that issue addressed, then you get time in life. If you have time in life, then you create miracles. You have all these ideas. Today, you don't have time because you don't have money. If you have access to capital as a startup entrepreneur, then your ideas will overflow. Then you work on one idea, next idea, next idea. And then you build business credit for each entity by itself. So you have two different ideas, two different startups, two different business creditors. You leverage on them, grow your company, pay them back from your business, treat the business like business, instead of eventually transitioning working in the business to working on the business. And then grow. That's something that often have talked about is the idea of working in your business versus on your business. And particularly when you're starting out and you're an entrepreneur, or probably even more so if you're a solopreneur where you just don't, there's just one of you. And so you have to find a way to balance that. And sometimes it is a little bit of a, essentially an investment that you're working instead of pouring in the hours so that you're bringing that revenue in, is that you back up and say, you know what, I'm going to be better served in the long run if I build up the business a little bit more as opposed to, as you said, sort of chasing that dollar. Once you don't have that, once you're not starving, once you're able to eat, then you can step back a little bit and you can really look at ways to grow it. And that's where I think a lot of businesses, and you may have seen this as well, it seems like that's the sort of the turning point is where they get to a point where they say, okay, we're able to actually work on it now and we're not just slaves to working in it. Yeah. So we got to break the cycle, figure out a way to do that. And that will take us to the end of part two. We've taught that discussion towards the end there, and we have talked about that before, not so much recently. You probably have to go back probably even a couple of years now where we did spend a lot of time on the concept of working in versus on your business. And you will see that a lot in growth kinds of articles and content. And it's basically because that is very critical, understanding that there is that give and take, particularly when you have limited resources, which, spoiler alert, everybody has limited resources. So it's something to think about and determine where your goals and your actual priorities are. But we're not done talking to them. We're going to come back next episode. We're going to pick right back up. But until then, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noor podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernoor.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of Developer Noor. One is the book, The Source Code of Happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the Developer Noor site. You can also find it on Amazon, search for Rob Brodhead or Source Code of Happiness. You can get it on Kindle. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can read it free. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot easier than trying to dig through all of our past blog posts. The other thing is our mastermind slash mentor group. We meet roughly every other week, and this is an opportunity to meet with some other people from a lot of different areas of IT. We have a presentation every time. We talk about some cool tools and features and things that we've come across, things that we've learned, things that you can use to advance your career today. Just shoot us an email at info at developernoor.com if you would like more information. Now go out there and have yourself a great one.